This question comes only a chapter after Jesus told his disciples, for the second time, that he was going to be killed. They were greatly distressed to hear it. Now, having barely absorbed that grief, they are arguing about rank. 1"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" It is hard to think of a question further from what Jesus had just been trying to teach them.
He answers with a person. He calls a child, an actual child, and stands him in the middle of the group. In that world a child had no legal standing, no independent voice, and no way to advance his own cause. Everything a child was and had came from someone else's care. Jesus points to a child's dependence. 3"Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
They wanted to know who ranks highest once you are inside. Jesus tells them whether they are in the room yet. There is no sliding scale between least and greatest that lets anyone feel secure by comparison. There is one entrance requirement, the posture a small child cannot avoid holding, which is complete reliance on someone else's care, with nothing self-made to point to and nothing earned to leverage. The saying about humbling oneself joins the two. Greatness and entrance turn out to be the same thing.
Then the child in the circle becomes every believer who shares that dependence, whatever their age. 6"One of these little ones who believe in me." Whoever welcomes one of them welcomes Jesus himself, and whoever causes one of them to sin would be better off 6"to be drowned in the depth of the sea" with a great millstone around his neck. That is not casual language. A millstone turned by a donkey weighed hundreds of pounds, and drowning was a death Jewish culture found uniquely horrifying. Jesus reaches for the worst image available and says the judgment beyond it is worse still.
If your hand or foot causes you to sin, 8"cut it off and throw it away." No one is meant to leave this passage having removed a hand. The point is proportion. Whatever it costs to deal seriously with sin, in yourself or in your effect on someone weaker in the faith, that cost is small next to what is at stake. Verses 6 and 7 warn against becoming a stumbling block to someone else, and verses 8 and 9 turn the same warning inward, in case anyone thought the danger came only from other people.
This is a hard passage to read comfortably, and it is meant to be. The disciples wanted to rank themselves above one another. Jesus tells them how seriously God takes the people they were tempted to look past on the way up, the small, the dependent, the ones with nothing to offer and everything to receive. In this kingdom that describes every person who gets in.
Ask whom you have been ranking yourself above, and whom you might have overlooked on the way. Then take the child's place, with nothing to leverage, and receive.
Prayer
Father, we have asked our own version of the disciples' question, quietly ranking ourselves against others instead of receiving what we could never earn. Teach us the posture of this child, with nothing to leverage and everything depending on your care. Show us where we have been a stumbling block to someone weaker in faith, and help us deal with it as seriously as you do. In Jesus' name, amen.